Numbers

The Thirteenth Tribe (Book)

The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) is a controversial book written by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-born British intellectual, whose most well-known work is Darkness at Noon (1941), an anti-Stalinist novel that influenced George Orwell's 1984. In The Thirteenth Tribe, Koestler advanced the theory that the Jews of Eastern and Northern Europe are descended from the Khazars, which was a Turkic kingdom in the Caucasus Mountain in the last few centuries of the first millennium C.E.,  not from the Semetic tribes of the Bible. Koestler wrote the book with the hope that it would put an end to the history of antisemitism in Europe based on the blood libel that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Instead, the book and its thesis have been used by antisemitic groups against Zionists and the State of Israel.  Koestler's thesis has no support from mainstream historians or from scientists studying genetics.

How It's Used

“Koestler has never been particularly admired by Israelis since he rather petulantly rejected Zionism, because he failed at it. He went further by saying that the creation of Israel meant Diaspora Jews should now assimilate without guilt once they had decided not to live here. He also controversially claimed, in The Thirteenth Tribe, that the bulk of European Jewry is not really Hebrew, but descended from central Asian Khazars who converted en-masse to Judaism.”

“A first-rate book now more famous than read that certainly deserves resurrection is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, whose author's star fizzled as Orwell's rose (the latter recently the subject of an admirable, and rightly admiring, essay by Christopher Hitchens).

"Written 30 years before he went a little nuts in the 1960s (The Thirteenth Tribe, say no more), but soon after he left the Communist Party, Darkness tells of Comrade Rubashov, a history-intoxicated Old Bolshevik leader and devout believer in communism's inevitable future triumph, who is imprisoned and confesses to the imaginary political crimes that must doom him.”

“Ferro proves that Jews existed in Berber lands. They were not converted but became Jewish by 'osmosis', absorbing their neighbours' religion because it suited their struggle against the hegemony of the Roman and, later, Arab empires. He also appears to legitimise Arthur Koestler's claim in The Thirteenth Tribe, that the majority of today's European Jewry are converts from the Central European Khazak kingdom. Even more sensationally, he suggests that the Jews were in the land of France before the Gauls. Therefore, there is no 'Jewish race', and those Jews who survived the Holocaust are probably not Semites at all. Indeed, many French people refer to Jews not as 'les juifs', which is considered pejorative by those who lived through Petain's anti-Jewish laws, but as 'les Israelites'.”

“Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote The Thirteenth Tribe in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

“By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.”

“Having temporarily abandoned Zionism for Communism, he resumed his engagement by covering (and participating in) the violent birth of Israel, initially taking the side of the Menachem Begin ultranationalists but eventually becoming sickened by the violence of the Zionist right and finally worrying whether there should be a Jewish state at all. Scammell is not quite in his depth here: he conflates the Stern gang and the Irgun and gives superficial treatment (as he also does, bizarrely, to Koestler’s part in producing The God That Failed) to a subsequent book, The Thirteenth Tribe. In this, his last semi-serious work, Koestler suggested that Ashkenazi Jews were actually descended from the lost people of Khazaria, who before vanishing from the northern Caucasus a thousand years ago had somehow opted to Judaize themselves. One implication of that theory was that no authentic Ashkenazi Jewish tie to Palestine could ever be established. 'Arthur just rather enjoys betraying his former friends,' I remember Patricia Cockburn [the third wife of British journalist Claud Cockburn] snorting when this effort was published in the 1970s.”

Links